How terrible epidemics in the South of Russia won in the Civil War

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

The civil war in Russia was not only a military and political confrontation. Reds, whites, greens, self-styled civilians, civilians had one common enemy that struck everyone indiscriminately. People died from infectious diseases more often than on the battlefields.

South of Russia has become vulnerable to infections for many reasons. Thousands of demobilized soldiers passed through this territory after the withdrawal of Russia from the First World War. Then a large-scale Civil War broke out. The successes of the Volunteer Army became a signal for refugees from Russian capitals, who literally flooded Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinodar, and resort settlements. Great crowding was observed in prisoner of war camps, at train stations, on trains. As elsewhere in Russia, which survived the war and revolution, there was a shortage of doctors, medicines, disinfectants; the sanitary condition of the cities left much to be desired.

"Spaniard" is on tour

"Now there is a big fashion for the Spanish disease. In living rooms it is a favorite topic. In pharmacies, it is the most widespread popular recipe. And even in newspapers, the Spanish disease goes under a special heading," Viktor Sevsky (Veniamin Krasnushkin) described the realities of Rostov in early October 1918, a young feuilletonist and writer. Further, he predicted the appearance of articles and lectures on a fashionable topic - "Pushkin and the Spanish disease", "Impressionism in painting and the Spanish disease", a cheerful comedy "for adults" in the theater of miniatures, where a young man dances and sings with a burning Spanish woman "in light disability "(that is, slightly naked) and" elegant cap ". The feuilleton could not do without a "Spanish" script for a "new film" called "She broke his heart to pieces … She is a Spanish disease", where the role of the "Spanish woman" was assigned to the "incomparable Vera Cold"¹.

It is unlikely that Sevsky himself or one of the readers of the "Azov Territory" remembered the innocent joke a few months later, in February 1919, when all of Odessa said goodbye to the "screen queen" who was burnt out from the Spanish flu, and a little later Russian viewers with tears before our eyes watched the film "The Funeral of Vera Kholodnaya" filmed by P. Chardynin.

The "Spanish flu" that struck Europe, the USA, Asia in 1918 (it was the Spaniards who were massively ill who were the first to talk about the pandemic) penetrated into Russia, engulfed in the Civil War. Initially, not too serious materials in the South Russian press about the foreign "adventures" of the "Spanish woman" and feuilletons like the one above were soon replaced by alarming reports of the first victims. The editors of the same "Azov Territory" even developed a questionnaire with questions to specialists about the nature and characteristics of the disease, the effectiveness of quarantine measures.

Leading doctors of Rostov-on-Don - professors of Donskoy (former Warsaw) University therapist A. I. Ignatovsky, bacteriologist V. A. Barykin, pathologist I. F. Pozharsky agreed that this still unexplored type of influenza affects mainly young people, acting first on the respiratory tract, and then affects the organs most susceptible to disease. At the first time of the epidemic, when patients were not taken care of, severe cases were observed, when a fatal outcome followed a day later. After taking precautions, severe cases were less common, and even those with pneumonia generally recovered. During the Spanish flu epidemic, about 25% of the population were healthy carriers of the germs of this disease without any signs of illness, but at the same time infecting others. Local data indicated a mortality rate of 12-13% among "severe" patients. As for the closure of schools, according to doctors, it was more important to prevent the gathering of people on the streets, on the Don embankment, to cancel the cinema sessions, where teenagers inevitably aspired. In educational institutions, it was required to strengthen hygiene measures - disinfection and ventilation.

Caricature by local artist A. N. Voronetsky - a sinister-looking lady in Spanish attire against the background of cemetery crosses - visualized the seriousness of the situation. Sad puns were in use, such as "the fees have dropped in theaters, because now the Spanish woman is touring." However, the "Spanish" theme had already lost its former urgency by mid-November. She was interrupted by the outbreak of a new epidemic.

Typhus on the agenda

At first, typhus was an occupational disease of the military. There were infected among the participants in the Ice Campaign of the Volunteer Army, but most of them were among the Red Army soldiers - almost half of the total. According to contemporaries, typhoid louse contributed more to the retreat of the Red Army than the enemy's onslaught².

In Yekaterinodar, which became the "white" capital, in November 1918 there were already about 200 typhoid patients. But everything was just beginning. As reported by local newspapers, in January 1919, 1,500 people were sick with typhoid in the city, and in February up to eight hundred were sick weekly. "At the cemetery of little Yekaterinodar during the funeral of my master Eroshov (a large industrialist, in whose house Prince Dolgorukov who fled from Moscow received shelter. - Auth.), who died of typhus, 5-6 funeral processions approached. A gloomy picture, reminiscent of a scene from "A Feast in Time of the Plague" at the Art Theater, "a contemporary recalled.^{I am}… Among the victims of the epidemic - "Kuban Tretyakov" F. A. Kovalenko is the founder and permanent director of the Yekaterinodar Art Gallery.

The situation was no better in Rostov-on-Don, despite the selfless devotion of doctors, including professors and students of the medical faculty of the Don University and the Women's Medical Institute. Many of them became infected; 44-year-old professor I. F. Pozharsky. Caring for typhoid patients at home has become dangerous, but also popular for people with some basic skills. The newspapers were full of such proposals. Advertisements from insurance companies called for taking care of relatives and insuring their lives as soon as possible.

Who fought the epidemic and how

Cossack and "volunteer" authorities took care of the creation of disinfection units, specialized hospitals, for which linen was requisitioned from citizens. Baths with the ability not only to "wash", but also to disinfect things, served the military, refugees and the poorest population free of charge.

Throughout the territory controlled by the Volunteer Army, evacuation and medical-feeding points, military hospitals were opened. Mass evacuation of patients was considered unacceptable. It was important to accumulate the forces of medical and military medical departments, the Red Cross, the Union of Cities, the Zemsky Union, self-government bodies, to eliminate the understaffing of doctors in combat units, which reached 35%. All linen of sanitary personnel and employees of the railways were ordered to be treated with an "insectivist" consisting of creosol or unrefined carbolic acid, green soap and oil residues⁴.

In the Kuban, the fight against a dangerous infection was supervised by the chairman of the Regional Sanitary-Executive Commission V. A. Yurevich is an experienced bacteriologist, professor at the Military Medical Academy. During the First World War, he provided anti-epidemic measures in the Caucasus and Central Asia, since June 1917 he headed the Main Military Sanitary Directorate of the Russian Army. After moving from the Kuban to the Crimea at the end of 1919, Yurevich established there the production of serums and vaccines against cholera, typhoid, and diphtheria.

The scientific and methodological center for combating the epidemic on the Don was the Rostov Bacteriological Institute, which was under the jurisdiction of the All-Russian Union of Cities. Its director, and at the same time head of the bacteriology departments of two Rostov universities V. A. Barykin recently headed a bacteriological detachment to serve the Caucasian Front.⁵… Students and doctors "to holes" read his promptly published "Lectures on Epidemiology and Bacteriology of Typhus". The press encouraged the population with reports about Barykin's method of treating typhus, which was injecting patients with mercury and serum from the blood of those who recovered from typhus⁶… The serum was really effective. The first recipients were 158 doctors and nurses who worked in typhoid barracks, and more than half were immunized three times. Only seven contracted typhus, two of them died⁷… The Bacteriological Institute supplied vaccination teams, hospitals and infirmaries, army units, educational institutions, and individuals with its products. Much explanatory work was carried out on the pages of newspapers.

Barykin's "right hand" was the young doctor P. F. Zdrodovsky, a future well-known microbiologist and immunologist. Medical students, among whom Zinaida Ermolyeva stood out, rendered a great deal of help. Later on her fragile shoulders will lay down the elimination of the cholera epidemic in the Don, in Central Asia, in Stalingrad besieged by the Nazis. Created by Z. V. Yermolyeva, the first domestic antibiotic, will save many lives. Millions of readers and viewers will love her literary and "cinematic" incarnation - Tatyana Vlasenkova, the heroine of the cult novel by V. A. Kaverina "Open Book". And it all began in Rostov-on-Don, covered with typhus …

In the spring of 1919, the number of patients with typhoid decreased, but doctors predicted the appearance of cholera and dysentery in the summer, and in the fall - the inevitable return of the typhoid epidemic. It was urgently proposed to take measures to ensure the quality of drinking water, cleanliness in public places. All railway stations were supposed to have working boilers. Epidemiologically, the summer passed calmly, despite the fact that outbreaks of infectious diseases occurred in cities and in overcrowded resorts on the Black Sea coast and the Caucasian Mineral Waters.

The theme of fighting epidemics was central at the autumn congresses of doctors in Novocherkassk, Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinodar. The need was emphasized "not formally, but in fact" to provide the population with outpatient and hospital treatment, to introduce compulsory vaccinations against typhoid and cholera for the working population. Prisoners of war who worked at the Don enterprises were proposed to pass through special isolation points in advance.⁸… Measures were developed to insure medical personnel. In the Kuban, preparations were being made for the opening of a medical faculty and the creation of the North Caucasian Bacteriological Institute on the basis of a small bacteriological laboratory (these projects were implemented a year later). But there was no time for the buildup. Already in September 1919, foci of infectious diseases began to flare up: data on patients with typhus, relapsing fever, and typhoid came from everywhere. The threat of bubonic plague, the cases of which took place in neighboring Turkey, was not ruled out.

Two doctors for three hundred beds …

The rapid retreat of the Whites and the refugees who followed them under the onslaught of the Red Army in late 1919 - early 1920 aggravated the epidemiological situation to the limit. Thousands of patients from the front entered Rostov-on-Don, Yekaterinodar and other cities. All more or less suitable premises were equipped for typhus hospitals. The statistics of the sick, especially among the civilian population, were no longer kept.

The culmination of the disaster was the situation in the overpopulated Novorossiysk. Mayor L. A. Senko-Popovsky telegraphed on December 3, 1919 to the chief chief of the medical unit of the Volunteer Army S. V. Sheremetyeva: "There are only two doctors in a typhoid hospital with 300 beds and they cannot cope"⁹.

Tens of thousands of people with suitcases, baskets, bundles slept wherever they could, ate whatever they could, and did not have the opportunity to wash and change their clothes. Typhus did not spare either ordinary people or famous people. "Nord-Ost blew. He mowed typhus. He mowed down the violent Purishkevich, at whose funeral there were many people. Already at the end of February, before the evacuation, he died of typhus and Prince [ide] E. N. Trubetskoy. His funeral service was sad: - a simple, wooden coffin, an almost empty church "- recalled one of the leaders of the Cadet Party PD Dolgorukov¹⁰.

Survival recipe from academician Vernadsky

Among the huge mass of people who found themselves in the white South was one of the most authoritative scientists in Russia - Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky. The 57-year-old academician arrived in Rostov-on-Don on December 9, 1919, at the height of the typhus epidemic, to prevent the closure of the young Ukrainian Academy of Sciences, which he headed. Then the scientist moved to Yekaterinodar. He spent several days in Novorossiysk, waiting for the ship to the Crimea. He met with comrades in the Cadet Party, spoke at meetings of scientific societies, and published in the press. He left Novorossiysk in good health.

Vernadsky felt the first symptoms of the disease on January 20, 1920, when he was already in Yalta, with his family. He diagnosed himself unmistakably - typhus. With a "heavy" but "mentally clear and fresh" head, he pondered the structure of a book about living matter and "read with pleasure." The subsequent critical condition lasted for about a month. During this time, the doctor who treated him "from God" K. A. Mikhailov became infected and died, and the scientist, who was between life and death, reflected on the meaning of life from a religious and philosophical point of view and … painted the next quarter of a century of his life. The research in the British Museum, the creation and long-term activity of the Institute of Living Matter in the USA, the writing of a book on mineralogy "which was supposed to bring the results of Russian cultural work into world culture", the careers of children and the growing up of grandchildren were visualized in detail.

To carry out what was planned, it was necessary, at least, to recover. And this joyful event happened. The academician quickly returned to duty, headed the Tavrichesky University, the rector of which R. I. Helvig died of typhus in October 1920. And yet - Vernadsky decided to delve deeper into the life of parasites. As the first test subject, he chose … a louse¹¹… And ahead were 25 years of an interesting, eventful life …

^{1. Priazovsky Territory. 1918.23 September (6 October). P. 2.}

^{2. Morozova OM Anthropology of the Civil War. Rostov n / D, 2012. S. 457-476.}

^{3. Dolgorukov P. D. Great devastation. Madrid, 1964, p. 136.}

^{4. Logs of the sessions of the Special Meeting under the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces in the South of Russia A. I. Denikin. M., 2008. S. 195, 201.}

^{5. Kartashev A. V., Geiko O. A. Bacteriological detachment of the Caucasian Committee of the All-Russian Union of Cities (1915-1917) // Military History Journal. 2016. N 12. S. 51-57.}

^{6. Azov Territory. 1919.18 February (4 March). P. 2.}

^{7. Krementsov N. L. In Search of a Cure for Cancer: The KR Case. SPb., 2004. S. 55.}

^{8. Medicine. 1919. N 25. S. 878, 911, 916.}

^{9. Archive of Novorossiysk. F. 2. Op. 1. D. 1029. L. 35.}

^{10. Dolgorukov P. D. Great devastation. P. 157.}

^{11. Archive of the RAS. F. 518. Op. 2. D. 45. L. 202.}